


all that glitters is not gold

by matchaball



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, Minor Violence, Slow Burn, infiltration and extraction, spy AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-24 05:16:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13206768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matchaball/pseuds/matchaball
Summary: “Youidiot,” Chloé begins furiously before stopping dead in her tracks. Sky blue eyes blink back at her, unnaturally unruffled and infuriatingly casual about being threatened with instant death. Familiar, firetruck-red hair pulled back into a half-ponytail is the biggest tell though, and she almost wants to stab him again with her heels for the sheergall-“Chloé,” Adrien says calmly, delicately, “meet Nathanael: your extraction, and your new partner.”





	all that glitters is not gold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [powerdragonmoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/powerdragonmoon/gifts).



> HAPPPPPYY (late) BIRTHDAY [MOON](https://powerdragonmoon.tumblr.com/)!!! ♥ ♥ ♥ You're always so amazingly sweet and kind and I'm forever thankful that we somehow found each other in this big, strange world of fandom and became friends! I never could shake off the idea of spy au after talking about it with you, so here's my gift to you ;) It's my first time writing ChloNath, so sorry if the characterizations are off! ^^; This was SUPER fun to write though, so I hope it makes for an equally enjoyable read!! Happy birthday again my dear! ♥ 
> 
> Also: Chloé's [dress](http://mmmatchaball.tumblr.com/post/166084613614/soph-okonedo-laverne-cox-attends-day-2-of-the) and [heels](http://mmmatchaball.tumblr.com/post/159989367680/nxxmph-mood)!

Chloé Bourgeois does not _do_ subtle.

Subtle would kind of defeat the point of the sleek black dress ensemble gracing her figure for tonight’s assignment, where her every move glitters from the gold embroidery running along the sheer nude fabric covering her collarbones and dipping down over her left shoulder and breast. Spiky gold bracelets flash at her wrists, matched by the outrageously expensive earrings dangling daintily from her ears. Even the turn of her head attracts attention, from the smooth shine of her honey gold hair, to the gold glint of the singular hair comb pinning her complicated updo in place.

If anything else, the waist high slit up the side of her dress, loosely held together by slim strands of gold chain, shows enough leg to make anyone in the room momentarily forget their own name, especially since she’s brought her killer heels to the game.

She could do subtle. She probably _should_ , given her line of work.

But she won’t.

“Doing all right there, Clo?” a voice crackles through the comms hidden in her earrings.

“I’m boooored,” Chloé sighs. A martini hangs from her hand as she surveys the crowd milling around the art gallery for whatever fundraiser they are all apparently a part of.

“You have to wait for the chairman to give his speech, that way all the security gets redirected-”

“-to him, I know, I know.” Chloé rolls her eyes as she drains the rest of her martini. As she signals the bartender for another, she mutters, “Keep me entertained then, Adrien.”

“I’ll do my best,” Adrien laughs. “What do your regular partners do when they’re paired up with you at this end?”

“They’re not partners.” The bartender makes eye contact with her as he prepares her next drink, but all it takes is a slow smile, a suggestive tilt of her head, and a small wink for him to fumble and accidentally spill a bit of gin over the edge. Too easy. “And I don’t know, they never last long enough for me to actually be entertained by them.”

“Except for one.”

She doesn’t answer that. Her original support, her very first, _had_ been a partner to her, for as long as they worked together, for as much as he teased her during missions. Her hot temper and biting words only seemed to amuse him, and even though they knew each other, she’d only ever called him _Red_ for how riled up he could get her in the midst of an assignment.

It was a strange partnership, but it was a good one. Until she went out on an assignment one day and heard another voice at the other end of her comms, another voice that was so nervous, so obviously new, that Chloé ended up silencing communications and going through her assignment solo rather than relying on such dubious support.

The new girl hadn’t lasted long. Neither had any of the other supports assigned to her since.

“You know what they call you here, back at HQ?” Adrien asks.

“Enlighten me.”

“Killer Bee.”

“I’m touched.” Chloé’s tone is about as dry as her martini.

“Yeah,” Adrien chuckles. “Everyone who’s been assigned to you looks like they got handed their death sentence.”

“Everyone except you.”

“Just this time,” he points out. “And only because I broke my leg and Ladybug broke three ribs and nearly punctured a lung during our last mission. Neither of us are very good at quietly resting up though.”

“Hmmm.” Chloé’s answering hum is deceptively non-committal, as is her ensuing comment, “So you being paired up with me for this is purely coincidental.”

“Yup!” Adrien chirps back. Too quick, too bright. No matter how long they’ve been in this business, Chloé can always spot his tells; the perils of growing up together since childhood. “Besides, I can’t help out an old friend every now and then?”

“You can,” Chloé replies as she slowly stands and sidles into the crowd. “You don’t.”

“Me-owch. Well, Fu thought this particular assignment could use some… delicacy.”

Any answer Chloé might’ve given is discarded along with her martini as she accepts a dance invitation from a man she already spotted eyeing her legs earlier that night. Despite his wandering eyes, his hands stay respectfully in place as they whirl and glide along the floor with the other dancers, so he’s spared of any suffering she could’ve gleefully devised for him.

Her smile is a dazzling thing, a tool in itself, and she uses it to full effect on her partner as she scans the room for cameras, exits, windows, air vents, and security personnel. Art museums are always a little trickier, with all sorts of hidden motion sensors and silent alarms that could betray her before she’d even know it, but falling for any one of those would be a disdainful, graceless rookie mistake.

Chloé sniffs. She has only ever been one of the very best.

“Eight more minutes,” Adrien sounds in her ear again. “Take the southmost exit. I’ll disable the keypad and the warning alarms, but there’ll be three guards patrolling the hallways. You’ll need one of them for a fingerprint and eye scan for the next set of doors. Hang on, let me find out which one...”

As the music draws to a close, her partner asks, hopefully, “Another dance?”

She smiles, a pretty, empty thing, as she steps away. “Another time.”

She blends back into the crowd and begins making her way to the back. She circles around sculptures, greets important politicians and businessmen, and picks up a glass of champagne from a passing waiter.

“Ok,” Adrien finally says. “It looks like any one of the guys will do. Try not to kill anyone, Clo.”

“No promises,” she mutters as she drops her empty glass at a nearby table. Right on cue, the crowd begins to murmur and move as the chairman steps up to the podium, a beaming smile on his face and a prepared speech held in his hands.

“Go,” Adrien whispers, but she’s already gone.

The keypad at the door blinks from red to green and she slips soundlessly through before anyone can notice. The hallway she enters is empty, but she knows it won’t stay that way for long.

“Alright, two coming your way,” Adrien warns.

“Just two?” Chloé sighs as she languidly reaches up. She pulls her hair comb out, letting long golden curls cascade down her back, and twists two teeth from the comb out, revealing poison-coated needles. They hide between her fingers as she prepares to put on a show.

“Hey! You can’t be back here!” one of the guards yell as he turns a corner and catches sight of her. His partner is close behind, and one glance alone tells her they mean serious business. Bulletproof vests, at least three guns visible on their persons, and two, possibly three knives hidden on their shins, backs, and wrists.

Chloé gasps. “How dare you talk to me like that! Do you harass every woman who gets lost on her way to the bathroom?”

“Ma’am,” the other man’s partner takes over, his tone decidedly more polite. “I’m sorry, but you aren’t allowed to be here.”

“Too bad,” Chloé decides as she eyes him. A smile curls on her face, as if she likes what she sees. “Seems like you boys could entertain me a lot better than the stuffy old men in the exhibit back there.”

Trained professionals or not, she catches the way their eyes scan her once, twice, not with the gaze of a predator looking to take out its prey, but with the most basic and predictable form of want. Want, though, is easy. She shifts a little, hips swaying, legs sliding out of the high slit of her dress.

“So,” she whispers when she’s right in front of the closest one, “entertain me.”

He swallows and it’s his undoing as her hand slides up and jams a needle into his vocal chords. He chokes, the sound coming out strangled as the needle does its work, and despite his fingers twitching for his weapons, he stiffens up and drops to the ground as the poison paralyzes him.

The second man meets the same fate. With his partner’s back to him, he never even saw her coming until it was too late. He drops like a stone, his voice choking in his throat and a layer of foam coming to froth around the corners of his mouth.

Chloé sighs, decidedly unimpressed. She bends down and begins searching their pockets for anything useful she could use.

“Your 6,” Adrien warns, just as she hears the shout of “Hey!” coming from behind her.

No time to ready her needles, and no space to use them too as she hears the telltale click of a gun cocking in her direction.

“Hands up!” he yells as he stalks towards her.

“Oh please,” Chloé snorts. “Only point that thing if you actually have the balls to use it.”

In one smooth motion, she slides the small dagger hidden out from beneath the sole of her heels and whirls around. She grabs the guard’s arm and wrenches it around, not even blinking as a shot goes off and ricochets off the wall, before using her other hand to twist the dagger deep into his abdomen.

“Don’t even think about it,” she suggests pleasantly as he continues struggling. She brings her foot up and stabs her heel down onto his shoe. The sharp heel sinks through the leather and into flesh and bone, eliciting a strangled moan of pain from the guard before the poison takes him down too.

Unlike Ladybug’s legendary luck or Chat’s many fancy bells and whistles, distraction is her game; few ever think to look closer, to find the actual substance beneath. And the unlucky ones who do find the poison of her sting in lieu of the sweet honey they had hoped for.

“Just three?” Chloé asks as she wriggles her dagger back out. She wrinkles her nose as she wipes the blood off onto the guard’s clothes.

“Just three,” Adrien confirms. “Alright Clo, door at the back. And take one of them with you.”

“I heard you the first time,” she snips. She grabs the unconscious guard closest to the door and begins dragging him down the hall. Despite his size and bulk, she hauls him as easily as a rag doll. As she scans his fingerprint and his eye, Adrien’s voice crackles through her comms again.

“I won’t have eyes when you go in there,” he warns. His keyboard clacks furiously in the background. “I’ve disabled what alarms I could access but there’s still some stuff that’s rigged. I think mostly paintings, maybe one of the sculptures.”

“Mostly paintings,” Chloé repeats as the scanner beeps green. She drops the guard and pushes through the acquiescing doors. “Adrien, darling, you _do_ know why I’m here.”

“I was briefed,” Adrien grumbles. “Your painting shouldn’t have any alarms around it. Your extraction will come to you when you’re ready.”

“I won’t be long,” she assures him as she steps into the pristine, cavernous conservation lab.

Enormous paintings lie in complicated contraptions that she delicately avoids, and smaller paintings waiting to be restored rest in easels on neat, organized work tables. As she passes them by, she snags a pair of latex gloves from a box off someone’s desk. Sculptures and statues occupy a large corner of the room, awaiting their own restorations, but she heads directly to the rows of storage racks stocked full of paintings, snapping on the latex gloves as she approaches her target.

The racks slide out noiselessly as they display their contents to her. Chloé had never been much an art connoisseur, but she’d picked up a few things here and there from her original- her first- partner. When things got tense, he’d always distract her by dropping an interesting tidbit about a painter, about a particular colour, about art history.

It always drove her nuts, because art was hardly _interesting_ to her, but it’d always worked. She relaxed, when he talked to her.

Well, except for one memorable incident when he had actually _painted_ something while he guided through her a mission. He had used whatever obscure colour hues he’d been painting with and his paint stroke patterns to warn her when security was coming or when she had to disable an alarm, and she had damn near blown the roof off of the chateau she’d been infiltrating. The moment the mission had finished and the objective was in her hands, she had railed on him, as angry as a whole horde of provoked bees.

And he had just laughed.

“Found it,” Chloé breathes as she finds a match for the painting she’d been briefed to find. It’s an original Turner, she can tell that much, encased in an ornate gold frame.

She slides the rack out all the way and carefully flips the painting over. The back is empty, just plain canvas against the flat back of the frame, but she carefully detaches a spike from her bracelet and unsheathes the needle thin knife encased within. Carefully, precisely, she digs into the top left corner where the canvas meets the frame until the canvas comes loose. She peels it back a little more and digs the needle into the crevice of the frame, rooting around until she finds what she’s looking for.

She carefully draws her prize out into the light and watches as the faint light shines upon the key dangling from the tip of her knife.

“Shit,” Adrien swears. “You tripped an alarm.”

“Adrien,” Chloé warns as she slides the key down her bra for safekeeping and sheathes the knife back into her bracelet. She flips the painting back over and slides the rack closed. “My extraction, _now_.”

“Hang on, he’s coming. Let me see if I can reroute security…”

As Adrien handles complications from his end, Chloé sinks into the shadows, her eyes on all the exits she can find. She palms her hair comb in her hands and hooks her fingers through the gold honeycomb design decorating the top until they adorn her fists like brass knuckles. One push of a button, and all the teeth retract, leaving poison-coated needles in their wake.

A noise from the ceiling redirects her attention. Her head snaps up, but there’s only a vent with its gate dangling wide open.

Another noise from behind is the only warning she gets before a hand grabs her wrist. Her fist shoots out behind her, poison needles ready to sting, but her surprise target evades her easily. It was only meant as a distraction though as she stabs her heels down onto her intruder’s feet and headbutts viciously back. Despite the added height of her heels, she only manages to hit his chin but her heels find their target as the sink down into his shoe.

She takes advantage of his momentary swear-filled pause and bodyslams him backwards. They clip a storage cart, sending it flying across the room but that’s only a passing worry as he twists her arm painfully up her back.

Chloé snarls and pushes into the pain by headbutting back again. A thunk and a moan of pain tells her she’s finally backed him against a wall, so she stabs her heel down again until his grip loosens enough for her to twist around. One hand grabs his throat, pinning him against the wall, as her other hand stops just a hair’s breadth away from the underside of his jaw, the honeycomb glinting from her knuckles and the needles just grazing along his skin like a kiss.

“You _idiot_ ,” she begins furiously before stopping dead in her tracks. Sky blue eyes blink back at her, unnaturally unruffled and infuriatingly casual about being threatened with instant death. Familiar, firetruck-red hair pulled back into a half-ponytail is the biggest tell though, and she almost wants to stab him again with her heels for the sheer _gall-_

“Chloé,” Adrien says calmly, delicately, “meet Nathanael: your extraction, and your new partner.”

“My _what_?”

“Good to see you again,” Nathanael smiles and Chloé swears she sees red all over again.

“You _idiot_ ,” she repeats, upping the intensity of the venom in her voice. “Where the fucking _hell_ have you been? You were just- gone. No note, no message, nothing.”

“I was tapped for a new program,” Nathanael explains, apparently unperturbed about catching up while still under threat of instant death via poison needles by her. “It was on a need-to-know basis. And don’t worry, I was the best. That’s why I was assigned to you.”

“Of course,” Chloé sniffs, “I only ever get the best.”

“The only reason he was assigned to you, sure,” Adrien’s snickering filters through her comms and Chloé nearly rips her earrings out silencing them.

“I hear you’ve been through six supports since I had to step away,” Nathanael comments. A shit eating grin unfurls across his face. “I guess Queenie didn’t suit you as well as Killer Bee, huh?”

“Both are ridiculous,” Chloé sniffs. The sound of the door rattling jolts them both back to the situation at hand, and she finally steps away and sheaths the needles with the teeth of her hair comb. Nathanael steps after her, warming her personal space. He clears her by at least a few inches despite the towering heels she’s armed with.

She blames the adrenaline coursing through her system for the way the bottom of her stomach heats as he rakes back the flyaway strands of hair from out of his eyes. His impeccably tailored black suit certainly does not help either.

She blames the fact that he was her first, which is why he can so easily get under her skin.

“You’re my extraction,” Chloé snaps. “So, extract me.”

Instead of answering, he grabs her hand and tugs her along the shadows until they’re pressed up against the wall right beside the closed doors. The doors open into the lab, so she sort of gets what he intends: for them to just walk out the doors the moment security’s all swarmed in and left their backs unchecked.

“It won’t work,” Chloé mutters. “Even if Adrien’s disabled the cameras- which you should’ve, I know you’re still listening through Red’s comms- there’ll be too many for us to sneak by. Plus you’ve left fingerprints behind. They can trace you.”

“One: diversion.” Nathanael points at the open air vent at the ceiling. “They’ll assume we- sorry, you, escaped through there. And two: have I ever guided you wrong?”

Her deep scowl is answer enough, so she doesn’t give him the satisfaction of saying anything at all.

He chuckles, unexpectedly. Pressed this close together and she can feel the rumbles through his chest.

“Something you want to share?” Chloé asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Not really,” Nathanael answers, catching a lock of her hair and running it through his fingers. “Just missed you.”

“Now is not the time to be sentimental Red.”

The door busting open interrupts them and they both freeze and tense up as armed guards spill into the lab, guns raised and radios crackling at their sides. More and more come through the doors until the lab looks like a kicked anthill.

She was right. There are way too many for them to just simply slip on by behind their backs. She looks up at him, a question barely contained in her throat, but she waits to see what he does.

His hand moves to the pocket of his pants, and she watches as his lips move in a countdown from _three, two, one-_

A muffled detonation goes off in the ceiling and a thick plume of gas comes rushing out of the open vent, clogging up visibility in the lab. The guards directly underneath begin wheezing and coughing.

“Move it, I doubt they’ll be dazzled by your butt,” Chloé hisses as the gas fills every crevice of the room.

Nathanael looks at her, an amused twinkle running through his eyes. “Have you _seen_ my butt? Especially in this outfit?”

Regardless, he allows himself to be pulled by her, and together, they simply walk out the door. The hallway is deserted and they slip back into the main gallery without any notice. They join the panicked crowd and allow themselves to be herded out the front doors.

Chloé eyes him out of the corner her eye.

Nathanael was with her, at the beginning. He saw her first fumblings, her first embarrassing rookie mistakes, and was there all the way when she rose through the ranks and completed her first assassination, her first high-security infiltration, her first deep cover op. He’s seen her grow from being a newbie greener than fresh cut spring grass to the Queen Bee she’s infamous for today.

And she had always assumed her growth, her victories, meant his as well. But now…

“What _are_ you?” Chloé hisses as the distant and unmistakable sound of paint bombs go off, no doubt splattering all the security and artwork in the conservation lab in a rainbow of cheap acrylic.

Nathanael chuckles as they step into freedom. “I’m something of an escape artist.”

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t like this upsetting new trend in my fics where I realize halfway through writing them that I actually want to turn them into multi chapter fics (snlau, I get your 10k writing sprees now, I GET IT). Still, I suppose a one-shot is better than nothing ^^; 
> 
> Cross posted on [Tumblr](http://matchaball.tumblr.com/post/169123197004/all-that-glitters-is-not-gold) also! Happy birthday Mooooononononn, hope you enjoyed it! ♥


End file.
